The Natural Eddie Waitkus

 

I might say the weather was prophetic. A thunderstorm blew in before dawn that Tuesday morning, 14 June,  1949  breaking a ten day dry spell. Still the sky remained so uninviting only 7,815 filed into Wrigley Field. But after noon the clouds parted, and by game time the sun was driving humid temperatures into the low eighties.  Last place Chicago was hosting fourth place Philadelphia, but the real draw was the return of two popular players traded over the winter - pitcher "Mad Monk" Mayer and first baseman Eddie Waitkus.

“Rowdy Russ” pitched his typical game. While there were no temper tantrums this time, the scowling screw ball pitcher went eight and two-thirds innings, gave up ten hits and made two wild pitches, while allowing only one walk. Eddie, who was such a good defensive player he was known as "the natural",  also rose to the occasion, going two for four, with a walk, and he scored twice. The Cubs staged a ninth inning rally on two solo home runs, but 2 hours and 12 minutes after it began, the Phillies had won 9 to 2, improving their record to 29 and 25, while the Cubs sank to a dismal 19 wins against 32 losses. As morality plays go it was very satisfying for the pair of exiled heroes. But it was only the opening act.

Two miles north of the ballpark, the Edgewater Beach Hotel (above) had opened on Chicago's North Shore in 1916, just in time for the Roaring Twenties. With a thousand rooms and twelve stories over looking Lake Michigan, a private beach, tennis courts, swimming pools, a golf course, hiking and riding trails, a five star restaurant, and sea plane service to the downtown Chicago lakefront. The Spanish stucco hotel was the Midwest coast du jour for a decade. During the thirties, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw played in the outdoor and the indoor ballrooms, and were broadcast over the hotel's own radio station – WEBH. However the depression eventually grew so great it forced the owners to sell, and by 1949, 'The Sunrise Hotel” was an aging dame, concealing the mends in her petticoats - hiding the truth that fame and fortune, and youth and health are merely temporary distractions.

The Phillies team bus got back to the Edgewater at 5349 North Sheridan by four, and after showering, Russ met with his parents and his fiance Dorthy, who had driven the 80 miles up from their homes in Peru, Illinois. Eddie joined them taking a cab to a restaurant. Eddie Sawyer, the Phillies manager, had set a ten o’clock curfew. Although Myer usually paid little attention to such restrictions (one teammate admitted he roomed only with Russ's bags), this night he and Eddie made the check in. After escorting Dorthy and Meyer's parents to their room, the ball players returned to their own quarters in room 904. There they discovered a note addressed to Eddie, taped to the door.

Written on hotel stationary, the note read: “Mr. Waitkus; It's extremely important that I see you as soon as possible. We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about. I think it would be to your advantage to let me explain it to you. As I am leaving the hotel the day after tomorrow, I'd appreciate it greatly if you would see me as soon as possible. My name is Ruth Ann Burns, and I am in room 1297a. I realize this is a little out of the ordinary, but as I said, its rather important. Please come soon. I won't take up much of your time, I promise.”

Eddie would say later he thought the note was from an old girl friend from his hometown of Boston. But whatever his reason, instead of just calling the twelfth floor room, despite the late hour, Eddie decided to go there directly. It was about eleven thirty, and another thunderstorm was ripping the darkness, when 29 year old Eddie Waitkus stepped off the elevator on the twelfth floor.

The door of room 1297a was opened by a tall, dark haired young woman, who introduced herself as Mary Brown. She told Eddie, “Ruth Ann will be back in a few minutes. Why don't you have a seat.” Eddie squeezed past the fold out bed in the small room (above). As he sat in a nondescript chair (right)  he noticed three empty drinking glasses sitting on the dresser (left) – a daiquiri and two whiskey sours. Eddie realized with a start the woman was staring at him. He remembered, “She had the coldest looking face I've ever seen.” And then he realized the woman was holding a rifle. As he stood up, she shot Eddie in the chest.

The bullet drilled through Eddies' right lung, causing it to collapse, and lodged in the muscles of his back, next to his spine. Stunned, Eddie asked the woman, “Oh Baby, what did you do that for?” As he fell the blinding pain hit him. And as he struggled to catch his breath, Eddie heard the clinking of the telephone dial. After a moment, he heard the woman's voice. “I've just shot a man, in my room” she said. Then she hung up, walked out and waited beside the elevator for the police to arrive. When the attendants carried Eddie out of the room, Rowdy Russ heard his friend Eddie asking, over and over, “Why?”

The shooter willingly identified herself as 19 year old Catherine “Ruth” Ann Steinhagen (above), a typist for the Continental Casualty insurance company. She told the detectives, “I went to Cubs Park and watched Eddie help the Phillies beat the Cubs 9 to 2. It was wonderful.” But then she said, “If he had just walked into the room a little decently, I would have told him to call the police. However he was too confident. He swaggered.” Asked to describe her relationship with Eddie, Ruth Ann said, “I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way...Then I decided I would kill him. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew I would kill him.” She added, “I'm sorry that Eddie had to suffer so, but I had to relieve the tension that I have been under the past two weeks.”

The cops checked out Ruth Ann's apartment at 3600 North Lincoln Avenue, where it crossed North Addison. From the Brown Line station on the corner, it was less than five minutes to The Loop, where she worked at the CC Insurance Company. It was also less than half a mile west of Wrigley Field, where Ruth Ann had been a regular during the 1948 season, attending 50 games - before Eddie had been traded to Philadelphia. And on the walls of Ruth Ann's room there was a shrine to Eddie Waitkus, a collage of photos cut from magazines and newspaper clippings, even on the ceiling above her bed.

Her mother admitted the girl had developed an obsession with the Boston native, even regularly eating baked beans. Ruth Ann even studied Lithuanian, because Eddies' parents had immigrated from that nation. In 1948, when Ruth Ann started setting a place for Eddie at the family dinner table, her parents sent her to a psychiatrist. She told the doctor, “I used to go to all the ball games to watch him. We used to wait for them to come out of the clubhouse after the game.” When Eddie was traded to Philadelphia, Ruth Ann cried “day and night.” As spring training approached in 1949, she moved out of the family home to her Lincoln Avenue apartment.

At her arraignment on June 30, 1949 – 17 days after the shooting - Dr. William Haines diagnosed Ruth Ann as suffering with schizophrenia, and her lawyer affirmed that she was “unable to cooperate with counsel in her own defense”. Judge James McDermott committed her to the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee. 

Meanwhile, Eddie had suffered through four surgeries, and came close to dying more than once. But he was young,  and in good shape, even after his combat tour in the Philippines in 1944-45, where he had earned four Bronze Stars.   He would miss the rest of the 1949 season, and he never again achieved the .306 batting average he held on June 14, 1949.  But on opening day of the 1950 season, the Philadelphia first baseman went three for five.

Ruth Ann spent three years in Kankakee, repeatedly under going electroconvulsive shock therapy, as well as hydro and occupational therapy. In April 1952 the doctors deemed her to be “cured”. The prosecutors office asked if Eddie wanted to pursue a case against Ruth Ann, and he said no. Ruth Ann was never tried for her shooting of Eddie Waitkus. When the 22 year old was released into the custody of her parents (above), Ruth Ann told reporters she was going to go to work at the Kankakee hospital as a physical therapist, but she never did.

Most of the Edgewater Hotel was demolished in 1968, leaving a single pink colored apartment tower, and the once private beach. The site is now the Park Tower Market.

Eddie retired in 1955 at 35 years of age, with a life time batting average of .285. He had married one of his nurses, and they had a son. For many years he was an instructor at a Ted Williams baseball camp, teaching future major league players. But Eddie also showed the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, from his war experiences and his shooting at the Edgwater. He became an alcoholic, and a recluse. Said his son, “His nerves were shattered for awhile...and he didn't recognize the problems, but they hampered him for the rest of his life.” Edward Stephen Waitkus died of esophageal cancer on September 16, 1972, at just 53 years of age.

Catherine Ruth Ann Steinhagen lived quietly with her family in a nondescript north west Chicago home (above) until her parents died in the early 1990's. Her sister died there in 2007. Just after Christmas of 2012 Ruth Ann fell in her home,  hit her head and suffered a subdural hemotoma. She died on December 29 in the Swedish Convent Hospital, at 5145 N. California Avenue, two-and-a-half miles north of Wrigley Field, and about two miles west of the old site of the Edgewater Beach Hotel. She was 83 years old..

The incident inspired the book and film “The Natural”. But as you can see, legend often has only a passing acquaintance with reality. And reality, often has only a passing acquaintance with  legend.

- 30 -

A BLACK DAY FOR BASEBALL, The Death of Ray Chapman

 

I am writing this on yet another oppressive August afternoon. It is baseball weather, when all Americans should be surrounded by the comradely of strangers in shirtsleeves, with a penciled box score in hand and green pastures before them, a land upon which time dare not intrude. Baseball in August is an endless limitless existence,  from which other realities retreat, and which may be savored patiently until the final out is called.  

But I am thinking now of one particular afternoon, almost a century before this August, the hot and humid afternoon of 16 August, 1920.  In my mind's heart I am at the Polo Grounds, a bathtub  shaped ballpark along the Harlem River, at the very northern tip of Manhattan. 

It is home to the National League New York Giants, but since 1913 the American League Yankees have also leased time on the field. And as fans gather in the Coogans Bluff (above) stands beyond right center field, we are witness to a battle of the two best teams in the American League. The Yankees are hosting the powerful Cleveland Indians. And time is about to pause, to catch its breath, to teeter, balanced for a micro-second between one era and another. And as the fifth inning begins, this is the instant of transition.

The Yankees are using their best pitcher, the crafty right hander Carl Mays (above). He once praised another pitcher, saying, “That fellow has no friends and doesn’t want any. That’s why he’s a great pitcher.” The friendless Carl Mays may be the greatest pitcher in baseball at this moment. He was part of the Boston Red Sox dynasty that dominated baseball in the first two decades of the 20th century. But in 1919 he demanded to be traded. The Yankees paid $40,000 and gave up two players to be named later to put Carl in Yankee pinstripes. 

They wanted his “submarine” (underhanded) pitch, his blazing sidearm delivery (above), his un-hit-able spitball, and his reputation for brushing back batters who crowded the plate. In 1920 he was on his way to a 26 win -11 loss record with six shutouts. Today, 16 August,  he is pitching out of rotation because the game is so important and because Carl Mays is going for his 100th major league win.

The batter is the top of Cleveland's order, the veteran Indian speedster, short stop Ray Chapman. The cheerful songster is fondly known around the league as “Chappie”.  After nine seasons in the majors he is at the very top of his game. So far this season he is batting .303, and he has a lifetime 93 runs scored and 671 runs batted in. 

Chappie also has 233 stolen bases and he wields one of the finest defense gloves in the league.  But he made his reputation laying down the bunt. He crouches down, hunched over the plate, at the very back of the batters box, thus leaving the pitcher with almost no strike zone to aim for. 

It is this stance, and his blazing speed to first base - he once rounded the all four bases in 14 seconds - which have given Chappie an impressive on-base average of .358. 

But only a few close friends know that Chappie is planning on getting out while he is on top. He was married the year before, and has made plans to go into business with his new father-in-law. And some World Series earnings would certainly smooth his way to retirement.

As Chappie steps to the plate at the top of the fifth inning, it is a humid 82 degrees under a cloudless blue sky. The 24,000 fans lean forward in their seats. When Chapman is at the plate, things happen. In the first inning Chapman had laid down his 34th successful bunt of the season. Thanks in part to Ray's speed on the base path, Cleveland is now leading the Yankees 3 – 0. In the third inning Chapman had popped up. And now, as the fifth inning begins, Ray steps into the batters’ box and digs in.

On his very first pitch Carl Mays delivers a winding, rising, side armed fast ball bullet. With extraordinary velocity the spinning ball hurtles toward the plate, almost faster then the eye can register it. And in that second of time, between the ball leaving Carl's fingertips and it's arrival at the plate, baseball changes forever -  an era ends and an era begins - what might have been becomes what once was, what used to be. It is the blink of an eye. It is the passing of a shadow through a life. 

There is a loud ringing thud. As Mays steps out of his delivery he sees the ball is rolling quickly back toward the mound. Thinking Chapman has hit it with the handle of his bat, Mays adroitly retrieves the ball and throws a peg down the line to first base. And only then does Carl Mays realize that Ray Chapman is crumpled on the ground. 

The Polo Grounds gasp as if a single soul. 

The umpire, Tommy Connolly (above), sees blood coming out of Chapman’s right ear and nose. He asks Ray if he is alright. Receiving no reply he calls into the crowd for a doctor. At that shout, Ray opens his eyes and staggers to his feet. A few people in the crowd began to applaud. 

But after taking only a few steps down the first base line, Ray Chapman collapses again, in a broken heap. His teammates carry Ray into the club house where he mumbles a request for his wedding ring, which he’d given to a trainer for safe keeping. Feeling the ring in his hand seems to comfort Ray.

Meanwhile, on the field and with a new ball, the game resumes. Mays retires the next nine batters in a row and the Yankees fight back to tie the game at 3 - 3. It is a Yankee relief pitcher who gives up the winning Cleveland run; leaving the final score 4 – 3.  

Called in Cleveland, Ray’s wife, Katie (above, left), boards the next train for New York City.

Hospital X-rays show Chapman has a depressed fracture of his skull. The doctors operate and remove a 3 ½” section of Ray's cranium to lessen the pressure on his brain. The surgeon tells the Cleveland manager that not only is the right side of Ray's brain lacerated from the impact with the ball, but so is the left side, where it  bounced off the inside of his skull.  At 4:40 the next morning Ray Chapman is declared dead, the only person to ever die while playing a Major League Baseball game. 

A family friend meets Katie’s train from Cleveland at 10:00 am the next morning. But she does not tell the young woman of her husband’s death until they got to the hotel. Once behind closed doors, and told the horrible news, Katie collapsed in a faint (above).

That one pitch can stand as the unofficial end of the "Dead Ball Era", when the game was hit and run, steal and bunt, when the leather was mightier than the wood. It was a time when the game was more strategy than brute force, more brains than brawn, more spunk and more a team sport than it is today. 

It was a time when baseballs' greatest slugger was Clliford "Cactus" Gravath,  who in 1915 hit a record 24 home runs, 11 more than his closest rival.  It was not unusual for a league batting champion to have fewer than 10 home runs in a single season. It was a  time when Owen "Chief" Wilson (above), playing for Pittsburgh, set a record of 35 triples in a single season  - a record which still stands today, a century later.

And then, in 1920 the New York Yankees decided that their new $100,000 acquisition, Babe Ruth, who had earned fame as a pitcher, should stick to batting. In 1920, his first year as a Yankee, "The Sultan of Swat" hits a record 54 home runs, more than all but one of the other entire teams in baseball combined.  He also batted for a .376 average, and his .847 slugging average (total bases earned divided by total at bats) was a Major League record until 2001. The game had changed in a fundamental way after 1920, and the tipping point had come at the moment between Carl Mays releasing the ball, and it impacting Ray Chapman's skull.

Wearing black arm bands in Chappies’ honor (above), The Cleveland Indians beat out the New York Yankees for the pennant that year, and went on to win the World Series. The Yankees finished a distant third. The Cleveland team voted Katie Chapman a full share of the winners’ purse, about $4,000 (worth $45,000 today). Six months after Chappie's death, Katie gave birth to his daughter and named her Rae. A few years later Katie remarried, to businessman J.F. McMahon and he moved them to California. But she still mourned Chappie. In 1926 Katie committed suicide by drinking cleaning fluid. Three years later little Rae contracted German measles and died as well. 

Both bodies were brought back to Cleveland,  to be buried in Calvary Cemetery under the name “Chapman”. Ray is buried alone about five miles away in Lake View Cemetery (above), where fans still leave baseballs, bats and memorabilia against his tombstone. If you have a chance, you should do the same.

Carl Mays played for the Yankees for only one more season. In 1921 he won 27 games and lost only 9. And he  batted .343, unheard of for a pitcher in any era of the game. Despite that achievement, part way through the 1922 season he was traded to the National League Cincinnati Reds, where he went 20 and 9, making him the first pitcher to win 20 games in both leagues.

Carl Mays spent 15 years in the majors, earning 208 wins and 31 saves against a mere 126 losses, with an amazing 862 strikeouts in 490 games. His lifetime batting average of .268 makes him one of the best hitting pitchers of all time. And yet, despite what are clearly Hall Of Fame statistics Carl Mays has received only 8 votes for that honor. 

Some may believe in the absurd story that he fixed a World Series game in 1922. But the facts deny that. No, what haunted Carl Mays until his death in 1971,  what kept him out of the Hall of Fame, was that one pitch out of the thousands of pitches he threw over his career, the one pitch he threw in the August heat of the 1920 pennant race. It is something to ponder, as the dog days of summer approach once again, and the finality of September hints at the winter which shall soon to envelope us all. 

Quote from Wikipedia article on Batting Helmets: "It was not until December 1970 that Major League Baseball enforced strictly mandatory use of the batting helmet for all batters. Veteran players, however, were allowed to choose to wear a helmet or not, as they were grandfathered into the rule. The last Major League player to bat helmetless was Bob Montgomery, who last played for Boston Red Sox in 1979.

- 30 -

LESSON OF THE SNOW FLAKE

 

I want to share with you the lesson of a snowflake. Individually it is the lightest, most delicate, fragile thing in the world.  It takes over 220,000 snowflakes to make one pound snow. A cubic foot of snow can weigh over 62 pounds. But 10 inches of fluffy snow floating down to cover an acre of ground weighs over a ton. 

And if you keep piling up snowflakes for something over 800,000 years, which has happened in Greenland, you get rivers of ice - 53 glaciers on the world's largest island. Winter after winter, century after century, for perhaps 15,000 years, the gentle, ethereal fresh snow compresses the older snow beneath it, until 50 feet below the surface it becomes solid ice, and 2 miles down it crushes the water molecules so their oxygen-hydrogen bonds lock together in long bands, making glacial ice sharp blue and hard enough to cut steel and drown human lives.

The fastest of Greenland's “tortoise rivers” , the Jacobshaven glacier begins 300 miles from the western coast, at a 50 mile arc of 11,000 foot high snow ridges, 42,471 square miles of compressed snow flakes, fed by 118 inches of new snowflakes in an average year. The base of this 2 mile thick ice machine is lubricated by a thin sheen of melt water against the bedrock, allowing the glacier to be squeezed like toothpaste from a tube, rushing 40 miles to the coast at 70 – 110 feet a day toward the 3 mile wide Jacobshaven Fjord.

As late as 1983 the ice did not stop when it reached the water. Marine biologist Richard Brown could write, “The tongue of ice grows into a long, floating slab, anchored only by the hinge of ice at its landward end. But the hinge becomes more and more precarious as the ice pushes farther out and the tides begin to work on it, up and down, twice a day. The cracks...soon become crevasses....at last... the deepest crevasse breaks through with a roar which echoes off the sides of the fjord like a mountain in labor. 

"The slab crashes off the face of the glacier, scattering seabirds as it goes. A surge of water, three feet high, runs ahead of it and batters its way along the walls of the fjord. The ice berg is launched.”

It is called “calving”, and the 36 mile long fjord is jammed with thousands of newly born bergs, big and small, that scrape against the edges and bottom of the inlet. With the arrival of autumn, the air atop the ice sheet “...comes rushing down the fjord in a hurricane wind....(and) the bergs begin to move...until they are drifting almost as fast as a man can walk....grinding, jostling past the little port of Jackobshaven (above)  and out into the sea at last.”

Each year western Greenland produces 25- 40,000 icebergs, averaging 5-11 million tons each. Sunlight melts the surface, while the colder sea water protects the body of the berg. The berg becomes unbalanced, top heavy and repeatedly rolls over, offering a fresh face for the sun to attack. The bottom of Baffin Bay is coated with gravel and rocks scrapped off the hidden mountains of Greenland and dropped from rolling bergs like pennies slipping through a hole in your pocket. A few of hundred of these islands of fresh water ice in a salted sea make it through the Davis Strait and into the North Atlantic, to be shepherded south by the Labrador current.

The particular berg that is the subject of our story, has battled storms and seas that would have destroyed anything made by humans. But now, on a moonless night, the berg is approaching a border. The ocean has gone calm and placid. The air, at the very center of a high pressure area, has gone still as well, the pressure so high there is no fog. Close to the water surface a faint obscuring mist has gathered, held down by warmer air sent north from the gulf of Mexico.

Approximately 380 miles south-south east of Cape Race, Newfoundland, in a meandering, swirling collision, the cold southbound Labrador water overrides the northbound warmer - up to 68 degrees Fahrenheit warmer – Caribbean air, heated by the approaching Gulf Stream current. And then, out of the still dark, flickering lights appear over the horizon, and quickly grow brighter and steadier. An object is approaching. It is dwarfed by the 2 million tons of the remaining berg, 200 feet long and looming 140 feet above the water line, meaning perhaps 1,000 feet below. 

A human witness, on board the approaching object says it resembles “the Rock of Gibraltar”. The human object was less than a thousand feet long, and sits just over 100 feet above the water. But is moving so quickly, pushing 52,000 tons of sea water aside as it plows through the water at 20 knots – 23 miles an hour -  in a most unnatural straight line, on a collision course with the berg.

Abruptly, the object begins to emit noises, first clanging and then shrieks. The tenor of its thrashing changes. At last it begins to swing away from the ice, slowly, as if distracted by a voice faintly heard. But it is not enough. The berg feels the shudder of contact. But the human forged metal is no match for the glacier ice, compacted over a thousand years by hundreds of millions of tons of compressing snowflakes. The metal bends ever so slightly. A chunk of ice snaps off the surface of the berg, and shatters on to the deck of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic.

“The iceberg rocks a little from the force of the impact, spins a little, and keeps on drifting southward, changed only by a smear of red and black paint along one of its sides.”  The Titanic stops not far from the collision, and begins to make new sounds, and shed small pieces of itself. Then, within four hours, the Titanic is swallowed by the sea.

At dawn the next morning, another, even smaller object, approaches the berg. She is the R.M.S. Carpathia, soon to be joined by other similar objects. And for a few days the berg is surrounded by small human made structures. On one of these is the Russian-East Asiatic Steam Ship Birma, First Officer Alfred Nielsen takes a photograph of the iceberg (above), one of only three confirmed and mutually supportive photographs of the iceberg with a red streak across her flank, and thus blamed for the loss of the R.M.S. Titanic. Then, one by one the ships move away. And for a time the berg and the detritus of the collision float together,  southward in a warming Labrador current.

Eventually, this berg crosses the border, “...a boundary between the cold, gray world of ice and seabirds and the warm blue one of flying fish and Sargasso weed. The sea on the other side is (41 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, in a matter yards.”. Melting and rolling, the mass fades into the ocean itself. As Richard Brown would later write, “The ice berg goes no further south than...300 miles north of Bermuda, and then it is nothing.”

The particular iceberg held responsible for sinking RMS Titanic, and drowning 1,500 human souls, was unusual. Of the 25,000 to 40,000 icebergs calved by the west Greenland glaciers each year, few make it into the North Atlantic. At least 1,000 icebergs crossed through the Davis Strait in 1909 and in 1912. 

That number was equaled again 7 years later - 1929 -  which saw 1,300 North Atlantic icebergs. Not 15 years later - 1945 -  that number was equaled. But 22 year after that - 1972 -  saw 1,500, and just 10 years after that, in 1982,  the glaciers of western Greenland produced 1,300.  Just 2 years later, - in 1984 - there were 2,200 sited, 1,000 again one year later, and 1,900 12 years later - in 1997. 

The very next year - 1998 -  there were 1,300 icebergs. A decade later there were another 1,000 Atlantic icebergs and over 1,200 in 2009.  The glaciers of Greenland have been calving bergs at increasing rates. The iceberg that “sank the Titanic” was an early warning of what humans were doing to the planet we depend upon for our breathable air and drinkable water.

The Jacobshaven glacier has been in full retreat since 1850. And still we have refused to listen to its warnings.  Since 2003, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 10 billion tons of ice - each and every year. The Jacobshaven glacier has lost another 15 feet of thickness every year.

And in the decade since 2010 the ice river has retreated another 3 miles up the fjord.  Once back on land, there will be no more icebergs from the Jacobshaven glacier, only a flood of fresh water. No longer will the ocean have to wait while the icebergs to melt before their salty water is diluted by the influx of fresh. 

It is a tipping point, as if the berg was getting ready to roll over for the last time. After that, things speed up.

It will be a moment even a United States Senator, such as James Inhofe, from the land locked oil rich state of Oklahoma, using a February snowball to deny the power of the snowflake to destroy the dreams of greedy men. 

The lesson of the snowflake is that small things eventually add up to very, very big things.  But, if you wait until the big thing is visible and obvious, it is usually too late to change course, to avoid the fatal collision.  As it is now.

- 30 -

Note: All quotes from "Voyage of the Iceberg", the story of the iceberg that sank the Titanic"

By Richard Brown.  1983. James Lorimer and Company, Toronto, Canada.